Re: pdf and the semantic web

Alexander Garcia Castro wrote:
> Thanks to all of you for your replies. Thanks John, tagging the atomic 
> content, not the pdf as a whole, is exactly what I would like to do. How 
> is this related to the SW? easy, papers have concepts, concepts are in 
> ontologies, ontologies can point to resources capable of consuming those 
> concepts. This is particularly true in Life Sciences.
> 
> The actual "why" for my email: I am doing research on the intersection 
> between  folkwonomies and the semantic web in digital libraries. So far, 
> I have not found a realistic way to use a PDF in an open manner, similar 
> to the way one could use a latex file. All those libraries, APIs, XMLs, 
> etc etc are great, some of them facilitate by a lot whatever one wants 
> to do with the PDF. But so far, IMHO the PDF remains not so open, and 
> also IMHO is not part of what we could classify as generative technology 
> -which is what could make the difference in the scesess of the SW, see 
> *futureoftheinternet*.org/ for generative tech. 

If I had to annotate uneditable PDFs I might look at using XLink 
Extended Links.  I would still need a PDF reader to give me location 
information within the PDF--perhaps as a query string that could be 
appended to the PDF's URL. (I think there might be some such syntax 
already defined, but it's been a while since I worked closely with PDF.) 
Then I could either interactively or automatically generate any number 
of XLinks and put them in a linkbase.  I could then make RDF assertions 
about those links and what they pointed to, and provide a navigational 
application to display the documents as needed.  If my display tool 
could handle the PDF internals and understood the locator query syntax 
it could even highlight the targets or provide other enhanced behavior.

Perhaps the W3C Media Annotations Working Group [1] will address this 
problem.

--Paul

[1] http://www.w3.org/2008/WebVideo/Annotations/

Received on Thursday, 12 February 2009 01:52:22 UTC